The Drowning Girls. Paula Treick DeBoard

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       JUNE 2014 LIZ

      The Mesbahs’ house was only a block away, but it was a long block, outsize the way everything else was at The Palms—half-acre lots, semicircular driveways, the occasional six-foot frond dropped from one of the signature palm trees like the feather of an exotic, towering bird. Next to me, Phil had his hands in his pockets, his legs shooting forward in confident strides. I kept my eyes on my feet, sure that one of my heels would snag in a sidewalk crack.

      “It’s the Spanish Revival, right around the corner from you,” Myriam Mesbah had said during our sole conversation the week before, when I’d called to RSVP for the party. I’d scribbled Spanish revival? on the back of a receipt so I’d remember to look it up on Google later. “The whole neighborhood will be there,” she’d said. “You can’t miss it.”

      Her words always carried that sense of emphasis—as if they needed italics, air quotes, long deliberate stresses. What I have to say is important.

      Spanish Revival meant curves and arches, white stucco and terra-cotta tile and ornamental ironwork. It meant courtyards and balconies and quiet little nooks. For the Mesbahs and everyone else in The Palms, it meant a minimum of four thousand square feet and a resale value that was climbing—an asset they could list in a portfolio along with the apartment on the Upper East Side, the villa in Tuscany, the time-shares in Bali and Saint Thomas and little islands with names I couldn’t pronounce or locate on a map.

      To me, it was just intimidating.

      As we passed through the ornamental gate and entered the courtyard, Phil squeezed my hand, already damp and tacky with sweat. His grin belied a fierce kind of optimism.

      We were three weeks into our new life, our boxes mostly unpacked, the strong leathery smell beginning to wear off the couches, fingerprints already smearing our stainless appliances. Still, I hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that it was an experiment, like one of Danielle’s science projects on trifold cardboard: hypothesis, observation, data, conclusion.

      Hypothesis: the McGinnises will never fit in with these people.

      The observations were in progress, the data accumulating.

      But I figured it was a foregone conclusion: we didn’t belong.

      The Mesbahs’ house was humming with energy—outside the ten-foot mahogany doors, we heard the low pulse of music, a woman’s high-pitched laugh over the other voices. It was seven twenty, late enough to avoid the awkwardness of being too early, of having to stand around and explain ourselves, the new people. I’d taken my time in the bathroom, selecting a pair of earrings, spraying my hair repeatedly, dabbing the dregs of an old perfume bottle on my wrists—anything to avoid this moment, to prolong the inevitable.

      Phil made a minuscule adjustment to his collar and breathed a short huff into his cupped palm, checking his breath. “Ready?”

      I caught his fist halfway to the knock, imagining them all standing just inside the door, turning to look at us. “No.”

      “Liz...”

      “I know. Just give me...” I bent down and began to fiddle with the straps on my sandals. They’d been a last-minute purchase only this afternoon, after I’d rejected every single thing in my closet as being wrong for this kind of event. The trouble was that I didn’t understand the event. It wasn’t a barbecue; it was no one’s birthday. The invitation had read An instruction on wine and cheese pairing, as if we were meant to come armed with spiral notebooks and expect an exam at the end. In the dressing room at Macy’s, I’d felt good enough about the silky black pants to put them on my credit card; now, bent nearly double in the Mesbahs’ courtyard, I noticed that the fabric across my thighs was creased horizontally with hash marks. I loosened the skinny strap on one shoe and rebuckled it into the next hole before shifting my attention to the other foot.

      “Come on,” Phil breathed.

      Sure—I was stalling. Every minute spent on the Mesbahs’ porch was a minute I wouldn’t have to spend inside their house. In our previous lives, Phil and I had lived in a three-bedroom rental a few blocks off the freeway. When friends invited us over, we stopped by Trader Joe’s for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of microbrew. That was a social convention I understood. On the bottom of this invitation had been printed, in delicate scroll: Donations will be accepted for Shriners Hospital, Sacramento.

      “So this is a thing?” I’d asked Phil, showing him the invitation. “Come to our house, bring your checkbook and we’ll teach you about wine?”

      He’d shrugged. “It’s just an excuse to get together. It sounds fun.”

      “We’re going?”

      “Why wouldn’t we?”

      I’d been saying it in a hundred ways, and he hadn’t heard me yet. Because these aren’t our kind of people. Because we don’t belong. It was all a mistake, beginning with Phil’s new job and our move to The Palms, and ending with me standing in front of the Mesbahs’ front door in these silly pants and uncomfortable shoes.

      “All right,” Phil said now in the voice he sometimes used with Danielle, when she took too long in the bathroom or kept him waiting in the car. I secured the second buckle and straightened, spotting the outline of the folded envelope in his breast pocket. Two hundred dollars, payable to the Shriners Hospital of Sacramento, the going rate of admission into the social world of The Palms. It was both more than we could afford and ridiculously cheap, considering the heavy door knocker and the immaculate tile work.

      “We wouldn’t want to miss any instruction,” I said, trying to bring back a note of levity, of shared camaraderie and let’s-make-the-best-of-it. But Phil was looking away from me, the door was opening and the joke was lost.

      Victor Mesbah stood in the doorway, a glass of wine in one hand. In the golden light from the wall sconces, it looked like blood sloshing in his glass. “Here they are!” he boomed in a voice that echoed off the floors. “Just when we were СКАЧАТЬ